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Making your own natural DIY perfume is a great way to avoid the chemicals in many store bought perfumes, and it’s a great way for people who have sensitivities to the synthetic scents in regular perfumes to still be able to enjoy wearing a scent they love. And one of the best parts of making your own perfume is that you can blend your own custom perfume scent to create a signature scent that is truly unique to you.

What Type of Oils to Use for Your Perfume

For my homemade perfumes, I like to use essential oils because they are the purest and most natural way to add scent to your perfume and because they are easy to work with too.

Since part of my reason for making homemade perfume is to avoid the chemicals and artificial fragrances in store bought perfumes, I choose to use natural essential oils rather than synthetically-produced fragrance oils.

If you’re looking to make a homemade perfume that is natural and free from chemicals, you’ll want to make sure that you use good quality essential oils rather than fragrance oils that might sound natural but really aren’t. It’s also a good idea if possible to look up information about the company producing the essential oils to find out things like whether or not they use pesticides or herbicides on their plants, what steps they take to make sure that their oils are pure and distilled under the right conditions to preserve their beneficial properties, etc.

How to Blend Your Own Custom Perfume Scent

The first step to blending your own signature scent is to decide which scent profiles you like the best. Essential oils are grouped into several different categories of scents, and you can use your scent preferences to choose which oils would be the best ones to use.

Blend Your Base, Middle, and Top Notes

Once you choose your favorite scent profiles, the next step is to select a mix of base, middle, and top notes.

Base Notes

Base notes are the deepest scents that tend to be the longest-lasting scents in your perfume. Common base notes incloude:

Patchouli

Vetiver

Ginger

Frankincense

Myrrh

Sandalwood

Cedarwood

Blue Cypress

Middle Notes

Middle notes are usually the “body” of your perfume. The scents of middle notes won’t last for quite as long as the base notes will, but they are typically longer lasting than top notes are. Common middle notes include:

Chamomile

Cinnamon

Clary Sage

Clove

Geranium

Jasmine

Neroli

Nutmeg

Rose

Rosemary

Spruce

Ylang Ylang

Top Notes

Top notes are typically the strongest scents, but they are also usually the shortest-lasting scents. Common top notes include:

Anise

Bergamot

Grapefruit

Lavender

Lemon

Lemongrass

Lime

Orange

Peppermint

Spearmint

Tangerine

*Note: Because essential oils are so strong, it’s always a good idea to check with a healthcare professional first before using them if you have any medical conditions or if you are pregnant to make sure that there aren’t any contraindications.

How to blend the notes:

A common ratio for blending the base, middle, and top notes is:

40% top notes

40% middle notes

20% base notes

This is just a general guideline, though. You can play around with any ratios you want, or, you can even use just a combination of middle notes and top notes or just a top note by itself.

Using a blend of base, middle, and top will give you more depth to the scent of your perfume, but your homemade perfume can also smell amazing with the simplicity of just a single scent by itself. So, if you absolutely love lemongrass essential oil, for example, you can have a perfectly lovely perfume with just that one single oil, and you don’t have to feel the need to add other oils to your blend if you don’t want to.

My favorite perfume recipe is actually a blend of all top notes with lavender, lemon, orange, and bergamot. Even though it might not have quite the depth or the long-lasting scent of a blend with middle and base notes, I love the way it smells, and I don’t mind re-applying it a bit more often if needed.

Tips for How to Blend Your Own Custom Perfume:

Start with a small amount (just a drop or two of each oil) to see how you like the scent. This will help you not to waste too many drops of oils if you end up making a blend that you don’t like. And, if you do decide you like it, it’s easy to double or triple your recipe to make a larger batch later on.

Make sure you write down which oils you used and how many drops you used so you can create the same scent again in the future.

When you are mixing your essential oils, remember that what you are smelling is the scent of the oils undiluted so they will smell stronger then they will in the finished product. Once you add a carrier oil, the essential oils will be diluted, and their scent will be a bit more subtle.

The scent of the oils will change a bit as the perfume “matures.” You can certainly use your perfume right away, but just be aware that the scent might change slightly over time, so to get the best idea of how your oil blend will smell, you can blend the essential oils and leave them in a covered glass bottle for several days.

Choosing the Type of Perfume to Use

Once you’ve decided on the blend of scents that you want to use for your perfume, you can choose to make a traditional spray-on perfume, a solid perfume, or a roll-on perfume.

I personally prefer to make either solid perfume or roll-on perfumes because they are simple to make and because you don’t have to worry about needing any preservatives like you would with liquid spray perfumes.